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Black Lives Matter Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 22, 2015 5 Comments
It looks like Bernie Sanders learned something from his recent run-in with #BlackLivesMatter in Seattle because he's now taking great pains to reach out to black voters. Vanessa Williams of the Washington Post:
Bernie Sanders looks to broaden his appeal in South Carolina Bernie Sanders fired up a lively crowd of supporters Friday as he began a campaign swing through this early primary state that seven years ago helped to boost the candidacy of another senator who many thought couldn’t beat the odds of winning the presidency. Sanders even made reference to President Obama’s historic election in 2008 as evidence that the country “has in fact made real progress of overcoming our legacy of historical racism … But the bad news is racism still remains a much too real part of American life.”

Posted by AACONS on August 21, 2015 13 Comments
The #BlackLivesMatter movement has a message. It is a message they are so desperate for you to hear that they have recently shutdown an anniversary celebration of Medicare and Social Security for you to hear it. Even though that meant physically bullying 73-year old Bernie Sanders off the stage. Their message is, primarily, that the police are a threat to the African American community It is not a new message, of course. As Marco Rubio said, "It is a fact that in the African-American community around this country, there has been for a number of years now a growing resentment toward how the law enforcement and criminal justice system interacts with the community.” As a member of that African American community, I am well aware of this resentment and of the tension between my community and the police.

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 15, 2015 16 Comments
Dr. Ben Carson appeared on Your World with Neil Cavuto this week and spoke about Planned Parenthood, calling abortion the number one killer of black people. Later in the week, he was asked about his comments on the O'Reilly Factor by guest host Eric Bolling and stood by his statement. Ken Meyer of Mediaite has more:
As Bolling asked him about abortion rates in black communities, Carson responded by saying it was a matter of deciding whether those black lives matter as much. “The number one cause of death for black people is abortion, and I wonder if maybe some people might at some point become concerned about that and ask, why is that happening,” Carson said. He went on to continue his point about Sanger’s alleged eugenics leanings, saying that if Parenthood employees learned about her, they’d be less keen to defend their practices:
I encourage people to go and read about Margaret Sanger and go and read about the beginnings of this organization so that you know what you’re dealing with. One of the ways that they’re able to perpetrate the deceit is because people are not informed. The more people are informed, the less likely these kinds of things happen.
Watch the full exchange below:

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 09, 2015 30 Comments
For the second time in a month, Bernie Sanders has been derailed by Black Lives Matter activists. The last time was at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix. This time it was at a campaign rally in Seattle, WA. John Wagner of the Washington Post reports:
Bernie Sanders leaves Seattle stage after event disrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters A planned speech in Seattle by presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders celebrating the anniversary of Social Security and Medicare was scuttled Saturday after protesters from Black Lives Matter took the stage and demanded that the crowd hold Sanders “accountable” for not doing enough, in their view, to address police brutality and other issues on the group’s agenda... Shortly after the senator from Vermont started speaking, a small group of protesters took the microphone, shared a series of local grievances with the crowd, including school disparities and gentrification in Seattle, and then asked for a period of silence to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown being shot and killed during a confrontation with a police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Posted by Amy Miller on August 06, 2015 8 Comments
It's hard to believe that we started talking about Ferguson almost a year ago. For better, worse, or neutral, what happened in that town between teenager Michael Brown and police officer Darren Wilson has changed the way this country regards the ever-evolving relationship between citizens and the police. August 11th marks the 1 year anniversary of the day this quiet corner of the greater Saint Louis area exploded into chaos and violence, and city officials, local residents, and even those of us who watched from afar are concerned that renewed protests will once again overtake the streets.

Posted by Michael Stopa on July 26, 2015 30 Comments
Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, has made a career of painstakingly going into the police departments and town meetings and impacted urban neighborhoods to research the facts on the ground about how police practices actually affect lives. On July 21, 2015, MacDonald appeard on the Harvard Lunch Club Political podcast, hosted by radio talk show host Todd Feinberg and me.  The full 35-minute podcast segment is at the bottom of this post. MacDonald spoke out against the crippling influence that the "Black Lives Matter" movement is having on the quality of life in the very neighborhoods where the protests are taking place:
I think this is an even more extreme example of the way this country deals with race and policing, which is to talk fanatically about police in order not to talk about the far more difficult problem of black crime.
Proactive policing practices have been the target of protests against "police racism." Speaking about this so-called "broken windows" method of policing, where police detain perpetrators for minor, quality of life violations like turnstile jumping or loitering and smoking weed, MacDonald notes:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on July 25, 2015 8 Comments
The failure of the Occupy movement was epic in its crash-and-burn in the wake of "occupiers" pooping on cop cars, establishing rape safety tents, displaying food privilege, and being infested with rats and disease.  As amusing as the "up and down twinkles" and mindless, robotic repetition of speakers were, the failure of the Occupy movement is worth revisiting in light of its offshoot the #BlackLivesMatter movement. One of the reasons the left was so incensed by the TEA Party, and worried enough to come after us by any means necessary, is that we are a genuine grassroots, populist movement.  While they publicly railed against our successes and worked to ridicule and bully us into submission, they were always working away at trying to duplicate (i.e. manufacture) our efforts.

Occupy is still touted as "populist," an astonishing claim that is easily refuted in that it was a clearly top-down movement funded and organized by the usual suspects.  Likewise, we know that Ferguson was another crisis the left couldn't let go to waste, so the usual suspects hired and bused in race agitators, union members, communists, anarchists, et al.   These are all the same big players in the background, pulling the strings, and they have one goal in mind, a goal that Andrew Breitbart saw for what it was:

https://twitter.com/AndrewBreitbart/status/120953881818701824

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 18, 2015 28 Comments
One of the big secrets of the Democratic Party is the deep racial tension between the mostly white elite progressive leaders and activists "of color." We examined this in detail in 2011, Dem Base Fractures Into Twitter War And Charges Of Racism Against Professional Left. In that post, we documented the Twitter war between black activists and Joan Walsh of Salon.com and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake:
What is clear is that there is a growing fissure in the Democratic “base” over criticism by the (mostly White) Professional Left, as reflected in this Twitter exchange:
Those tensions have simmered for the past several years, and grown in the past year as the #BlackLivesMatters movement insisted that its voice was not being heard even within progressive circles.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 27, 2015 14 Comments
There, I said it. And so did Hillary Clinton, creating a backlash:
Hillary Rodham Clinton is facing backlash for saying that “all lives matter” in an African-American church in Missouri on Tuesday, offending some who feel that she is missing the point of the “black lives matter” mantra. Mrs. Clinton’s remarks at Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Mo. — only a few miles north of Ferguson, where a black teenager was shot by a white police officer last August — came during a broader discussion of civil rights in America. She was talking about how a disproportionate number of young people of color are out of school and out of work and, explaining that everyone needs a “chance and a champion,” she recalled how her mother was abandoned as a teenager and went on to work as a maid. “What kept you going?” Mrs. Clinton remembered asking her mother. “Her answer was very simple. Kindness along the way from someone who believed she mattered. All lives matter.” The remark caused a stir on social media, with some African-Americans on Twitter suggesting that Mrs. Clinton had lost their votes.
Here's the video:

Posted by David Gerstman on June 01, 2015 22 Comments
Baltimore has been out of the national conversation for a couple of weeks. Freddie Gray is dead. Six police officer have now been indicted in his death. Last weekend, Memorial Day weekend, Baltimore was one of several cities that saw a spike in violence. At that point Baltimore had 35 homicides for the month of May, making it the deadliest month in the city since 1999. But the killings didn't stop. Late last week a 31 year old woman and her seven year old son were shot in the head in southwest Baltimore. Little information has been reported. Police have not released any speculation about the motive behind the slayings. With three more murders Sunday, the murder count in Baltimore stands at 43, the highest toll in 40 years. What's going on in Baltimore (and elsewhere as we saw last weekend) is part of what Heather MacDonald calls A New Nationwide Crime Wave (Google link). After seeing crime drop for nearly two decades, crime is rising. The reason isn't complicated. With politicians claiming that the main problem in law enforcement is policing, a theme echoed by many in the media, and police realizing that they can be prosecuted and vilified for doing their jobs; arrests are down and crime is up.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 11, 2015 6 Comments
For years we have been documenting how stirring racial tensions on campus is one of the tactics employed by the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The methodology is to tie unrelated movements into the fight against Israel by portraying a common enemy -- in their terminology, "white settler colonialism." Israel and the U.S. are lumped together in that theory, so that whatever goes wrong in the U.S. from a racial standpoint is tied to Israel.   So problems at the Mexican border are used by BDS groups on campus to bring Mexican-American student groups into the BDS fight; police problems in Ferguson or elsewhere are used in movements such as "Ferguson2Palestine" to blame Israel; the BlackLivesMatters movement is brought into the fight against Israel in the same manner. Here are some of our prior posts on the subject: The NY Times focused on these racial tensions in a front-page, below the fold article yesterday, Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 27, 2015 16 Comments
This is becoming a recurring theme. When there is a riot or other protest in the U.S., particularly if involving minority communities, "pro-Palestinian" activists try to hijack it and turn it into a criticism of Israel. We saw it in Ferguson where "pro-Palestinian" activists spread lies that Israel trained the Ferguson police, and actually embedded themselves in the protests to try to turn the protests into anti-Israel protests. The same thing has happened repeatedly with #BlackLivesMatters protests, most notably the dangerous blockade of the San Mateo - Hayward Bridge. This is part of the emerging theme of anti-Israeli activists trying to tie unrelated movements, such as fossil fuel divestment, to Palestinian issues. Now we are seeing it with the Baltimore riots. The usual suspects, like Max Blumenthal, were out in full force immediately, trying to establish a link between the Baltimore police and Israel because some police trained in an Israeli form of martial arts:

Posted by Leslie Eastman on March 11, 2015 15 Comments
I cannot begin to fathom the pain of a mother or father burying a child, especially when their son or daughter is senselessly murdered. There are circumstances surrounding the death of Jamiel Shaw that even compound that horror, especially in light of the very reasonable concerns Americans have about the type of immigrants being encouraged to cross our borders unimpeded. Shaw's father recently testified before Congress about the circumstances of his son's death, at the hands of a DREAM Act beneficiary.
“My son, Jamiel Andre Shaw II, was murdered by a DREAMer, a DACA recipient, a child brought to this country by no fault of his own,” Mr. Shaw told Representative Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) while testifying before a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee panel. Shaw was murdered in 2008, before the Obama created the DACA program in the run up to the 2012 election cycle, but — as a young person brought into the country as a child, Shaw’s eventual murderer would likely have qualified for DACA status. “The illegal alien dreamer that murdered my son only served four months of an eight month sentence for assault with a deadly weapon and battery on a police officer,” Shaw said. “He was released from the county jail the day before he executed my son. Why was this violent illegal alien allowed to walk the streets of America instead of being deported?” “Do black lives really matter or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or a white policeman?” he added, before alluding to the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ saying that became popular following the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Mo. “My son was shot in the head by an illegal alien gang banger while he lay on his back with his hands up. he still shot him through his hand into his head and killed him.”

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 02, 2015 19 Comments
We previously reported extensively on the blockade of the San Mateo - Hayward Bridge on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by a group of protesters. What started as a #BlackLivesMatters protest was hijacked by anti-Israel protesters who draped the Palestinian flag across both sides of the bridge at its highest span. http://abc7news.com/483891/ The action was extremely dangerous, trapping hundreds of motorists and causing multiple traffic accidents. One vehicle with a 3-year-old child in medical distress reportedly had to be rerouted. 68 protesters, most of them Stanford University students, were arrested.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 31, 2015 27 Comments
We have reported extensively on the dangerous tactic of blockading the San Mateo - Hayward Bridge, including abandoning cars and draping a Palestinian flag across the roadway at the highest span point. Hundreds, if not thousands, of motorists were trapped on the bridge, with no way out and no way for emergency vehicles to exit. While ostensibly a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day #BlackLivesMatter protest, the event was completely hijacked by anti-Israel activists: [caption id="attachment_113857" align="alignnone" width="600"]https://twitter.com/farah_salazar/status/558214869648814080 (via Farah Salazar Twitter)[/caption] In a recent post, I noted that this how dangerous this tactic was, and how it differed from other protest road blockages:
While the protest ostensibly was about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it was hijacked as so many such protests are by the anti-Israel contingent, just like in Ferguson and to a lesser extent in New York City during the Eric Garner protests. Subsequent to that initial report, we have learned that it was much worse than originally thought. The tactics used were designed to cause maximum traffic disruption and mayhem, including protester cars being abandoned on the roadway, resulting in several car crashes and emergency vehicles being blocked. The activists used a dangerous tactic of blocking both directions initially, making the scene inaccessible initially to emergency vehicles... It’s nothing short of a miracle that there were no serious injuries and that no ambulances had to be redirected, as happened in Boston, or worse, were stuck in the traffic jam.
It turns out my fears were realized, as the parents of a three-year old girl in medical distress have threatened suit against Stanford University, whose students constituted most of the blockaders (h/t Instapundit via The College Fix). The Stanford Daily student newspaper reports:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 26, 2015 36 Comments
We previously reported how anti-Israel activists hijacked a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day #BlackLivesMatter protest and turned it into an anti-Israel event. They trapped hundreds, if not thousands, of motorists by setting up a protest line at the highest point of the bridge span, and also abandoning their own cars on the bridge to block traffic. This was an extremely dangerous maneuver. Unlike the blockade of Route 93 in Boston, for example, there was no possibility of motorists exiting. If an ambulance or someone in need of medical care had been trapped, there would have been no way out and no way to redirect ambulances or other emergency vehicles that needed to cross the bay. This maneuver created havoc on the bridge, with motorists driving the wrong way near the toll area in a desperate attempt to escape. [caption id="attachment_113843" align="alignnone" width="600"]http://kron4.com/2015/01/19/protesters-block-westbound-lanes-on-san-mateo-bridge/ (Source: KRON4 Video)[/caption] For extensive video and photographic coverage, see our prior posts: Here's a video we have not previously posted:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 23, 2015 25 Comments
We previously reported how, on Monday, January 19, 2015, Anti-Israel activists blocked the San Mateo - Hayward Bridge. While the protest ostensibly was about the #BlackLivesMatter movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it was hijacked as so many such protests are by the anti-Israel contingent, just like in Ferguson and to a lesser extent in New York City during the Eric Garner protests. Subsequent to that initial report, we have learned that it was much worse than originally thought. The tactics used were designed to cause maximum traffic disruption and mayhem, including protester cars being abandoned on the roadway, resulting in several car crashes and emergency vehicles being blocked. The activists used a dangerous tactic of blocking both directions initially, making the scene inaccessible initially to emergency vehicles:
Over 100 Stanford students and community members demonstrating against police brutality temporarily shut down the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge Monday afternoon, snarling the evening commute. The group made their way on eastbound and westbound lanes of state Highway 92 on the bridge at the high-rise around 4:50 p.m., CHP Officer Daniel Hill said. The protesters had been dropped off by cars on westbound lanes and briefly made their way to both sides of the freeway, he said. As of shortly after 5 p.m., eastbound lanes were reopened for motorists heading to Hayward but westbound lanes were still closed off for cars traveling to Foster City, Van Eckhardt said. Drivers were seen turning around at the toll plaza and going the wrong way on the bridge as CHP tried to find tow trucks to take away abandoned cars left on the bridge by protesters. The bridge was reopened shortly before 5:30 p.m.
[caption id="attachment_113857" align="alignnone" width="600"]https://twitter.com/farah_salazar/status/558214869648814080 (Image via Farah Salazar Twitter)[/caption] In this video taken by a stalled driver on the other side of the highway, you can see how initially traffic was backed up on both sides creating a dangerous situation high on the span (the initial comments seem to indicate the drivers thought it was an abortion protest until they got closer):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 20, 2015 18 Comments
Don't say I didn't warn you about how anti-Israel activists have set on a deliberate course to hijack the Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatters protests to their own anti-Israel agenda: It started in Ferguson, then the Eric Garner protests, and is being pushed by the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine through groups like Dream Defenders, which carries a Tides Foundation logo on it's website.  Dream Defenders was responsible for Marc Lamont Hill's trip to "Palestine" in which he recorded a video supporting "Revolutionary Struggle" against Israel. http://youtu.be/L2yMMdPTQ30 A key player in the effort to turn the #BlackLivesMatter movement into an anti-Israel movement is recently graduated Stanford student and SJP activist Kristian Davis Bailey, who writes not only for the anti-Zionist Mondoweiss website, but also has been promoting the effort in Ebony Magazine.
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